Art DC
April 26 - 30, 2007
Booth 215 | Washington Convention Center

Conner Contemporary Art and *gogo art projects are delighted to participate in Art DC, Washington's inaugural art fair. Our booth will feature works in various media by Conner Contemporary artists who draw inspiration from architectural themes. Zoë Charlton, Mark Bennett, John Kirchner, Julee Holcombe, Dean Kessmann and Brandon Morse negotiate between actual and invented structures as they engage with constructive memory, stereotypes, archetypes, architectonics, and typology to create their art. 

Zoë Charlton comments from the perspective of an African American woman living in traditionally white suburbia in her Suburban Squatters series. Charlton's large-scale drawing "Saint of the Suburbs" is dominated by a haloed, scantily-clad African American woman whose recumbent figure coalesces with a suburban landscape of cul-des-sacs and white picket fences. Whereas Charlton focuses on the social realities of racial stereotypes in her imagery of generic suburban homes, Mark Bennett escapes the mundane by making detailed blueprint drawings of his favorite movie homes. Although architectural contexts simulated in films such as Psycho and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? are comprised of disjointed movie sets, the artist shapes his visual memories of background minutia into cohesive environments. In multiples of these drawings Bennett shares fantasies of dwelling in legendary big-screen houses which exist only in his imagination. 

In the Architectural Voodoo series John Kirchner digitally exaggerates the archetypal facades of government buildings in Washington, D.C., such as the Federal Reserve. Kirchner amplifies and symbolically subverts the power represented by these iconic structures. Julee Holcombe also photographs recognizable buildings. She then digitally composes dozens of structures into seamless architectural aggregates within realistic vistas. In "Night Sketch" Holcombe revisits Brueghel's Renaissance master painting of the Tower of Babel to critique globalism and urban sprawl in her own form of digital painting.

Dean Kessmann uses digital processes in Cover to Cover, a series of prints inspired by Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies of industrial edifices. Instead of recording architectural structures, Kessmann scans overlapping edges of pages in rolled art magazines, such as Art in America, to create colorful, linear abstractions which obscure their objective sources. Brandon Morse also employs digital technology to create colorful abstract imagery in his video Crucible. Applying mathematical formulae Morse generates architectonic matrices which give rise to changing organic forms. 

*gogo art projects will present installations by Zach Storm and Matthew Sutton. In "That's What Love Will Do" Storm combines painting, drawing and sculpture in a pictorial narrative of his recent triumph over junk food addiction which contains subtexts devoted to his musical heroes and his obsession with the paranormal. Sutton will plant a cutting from "The Kudzu Project," a current six-month experiment in which rapidly growing Kudzu vines flourish in the front window of the gallery.

Art DC will be held at the Washington Convention Center and Conner Contemporary Art and *gogo art projects will exhibit in Booth 215. The fair will run from April 27th through April 30th with an opening night preview on April 26th from 5:30pm until 9:30pm. More information on Art DC is available at www.dc-artfair.com.